"I photograph to make personal connections to the land and the water. Each image taken, each image brought into existence as a print, deepens my understanding, my feelings, my bond to places that insistently request my presence. To photograph the outdoor landscape today is an inherently "environmental" act. My aims however are not overtly scientific or political. Instead my environmental stance is both more indirect and fundamental. To be out in the land and on the water— smelling, touching, observing— simply being present over time— is to lay an individual, human claim against their neglect and exploitation as mere, inert raw material or worthless by-product. I strive to make a claim quite different from those of law or property. I strive for a bond of kinship, expressing through repeated contact: you are not divided from me; we are one. I am attracted not only to wild and isolated lands or majestic and powerful bodies of water, but more especially to the marginal and transitional: a suburban creek and storm sewer outlet, a bank eroded by agricultural run-off, a swampy and flooded river delta, a muddy and stinking river mouth, scrub black willow trees that survive on a precariously shifting boundary between land and water.... These are the places that I would like to reclaim— the sullen land, the polluted waters— that call for my presence."

Jonathan Taylor teaches photography, graphic design, and visual art in a wide-variety contexts from Burlington City Arts, to the Frog Hollow Vermont State Craft Center, to Green Mountain College and Castleton State University. In 2005 he was selected as a University of Vermont Teacher of the Year. He has been a working graphic designer since 1993, and a photographer and visual artist since 1995.

RECENT EXHIBITIONS

Juried Exhibition: Art at the Coach Barn
Shelburne Farms, Vermont
September 24 – October 24, 2010

Juried Exhibition: Natural Wonders
PhotoPlace Gallery, Middlebury Vermont
June 22 – July 17, 2010

Featured Artist: Summer Member’s Show
Chaffee Art Center, Rutland, Vermont
June 11 – August 7, 2010

Juried Exhibition: The Landscape Show
Vermont Center for Photography, Brattleboro
April 2 – May 2, 2010

Juried Exhibition: Uncommon Portraits
Juror: Cig Harvey
PhotoPlace Gallery, Middlebury Vermont
March 9 – April 3, 2010

EDUCATION

MFA in Studio Art Candidate,
Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA)
Class of 2013

BA Marlboro College, Plan (Honors Thesis) in Visual Art and Literature
May 1998

802-461-7376

148 On the Green
Poultney, VT 05764

jtyr71@gmail.com
photo: Jonathan Taylor Self-Portrait

all photos copyright © Jonathan Taylor